


always ourselves we find in the sea

by theragingstorm



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Birds of Prey (Comic), DCU
Genre: 1950s, Ableism, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Merpeople, Canon Disabled Character, F/M, Falling In Love, Friendship, Hopeful Ending, Mentions of Violence, Merpeople, Mild Sexual Content, PTSD, Period-Typical Racism, Period-Typical Sexism, Some angst, mentions of homophobia and transphobia, no actual on-screen violence except during one dream sequence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-31
Updated: 2020-05-31
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:22:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24477889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theragingstorm/pseuds/theragingstorm
Summary: It was a clear Sunday in the spring of 1950, the seagulls’ call and the little church bell’s toll echoing through the small Rhode Island fishing town, when Barbara Gordon met a merman.
Relationships: Barbara Gordon & Everyone, Barbara Gordon/Dick Grayson
Comments: 23
Kudos: 53





	always ourselves we find in the sea

**Author's Note:**

> I pulled elements from so many canons this time -- Post-Crisis, N52, Rebirth, Bombshells (i.e. the post-WWII setting, Dinah and her backstory...) -- and DC cannot stop me. 
> 
> Also, hello self-indulgence, my old friend. 
> 
> Title from E.E. Cummings' poem "maggie and milly and molly and may".

It was a clear Sunday in the spring of 1950, the seagulls’ call and the little church bell’s toll echoing through the small Rhode Island fishing town, when Barbara Gordon met a merman. 

She had weekends off from working at the local library, so she woke up at eight o’clock, two hours later than usual. It had been five years since the war ended, so easing herself out of bed and into her wheelchair had become second nature, groaning softly, half-awake, as she rolled across her bedroom to the bathroom to wash up. Coffee percolating, her loose hair still wet, she rolled to the kitchen window and opened it; a sea breeze ruffled her blouse and loose skirt. 

Her father still worked with two states between them, in New Jersey, and even though she was about to turn thirty in just a few months, she was unmarried and childless, so she lived alone. Not that she had never had the opportunity to get married or have children;  despite what people tended to believe about spinster librarians, she  _ had _ had partners, people she'd liked, even loved. Just not people who'd lasted. 

Rhode Island Sound opened up before her window, shimmering blue in the tentative, cool sunlight; it was the very beginning of May, and in New England, that meant winter usually still lingered, just for one last hurrah before vanishing entirely at the end of the month. That particular little town sat just on the intersection of the Sound and the mouth of the Sakonnet River, the sky and the sea reaching in both directions until they met in a blurry silver line at the horizon. The little town was made up of clusters of red or white houses, sitting cheerfully near the water, matching buoys bobbing upon the water. 

Barbara’s house was painted rich green, and it was on the outskirts of the town, resting behind the grassy dunes and veiled from prying eyes. A small wooden walkway striped across her stretch of the beach, right to the edge of a small dock that lacked a boat. 

It was all so unlike the cities she had grown up in. 

But after the Women’s Army Corps had honorably discharged her and she had come back from the war just weeks before V-E Day, she found that sometimes, the city’s noise was just too oppressive to bear. 

Barbara drank her coffee and filled the cat’s food bowl before heading out to fetch her groceries for the week.

All the other women in the grocery store were shorter than her five-eleven, but from her chair, they seemed taller. The younger ones wore pink or red lipstick, and the older ones wore mauve lipstick, and most of them still wore nice dresses and curled their hair even though they were far away from what anyone considered cosmopolitan. Some girls as young as sixteen or seventeen already wore fraternity and club pins or even engagement rings, trailing after their mothers, twittering happily with their friends about their marriage plans. 

All of them gave Barbara and her wheelchair a wide berth. Some cast her pitying looks, some apprehensive, as though she were contagious. She picked up a tomato to examine it, and one woman moved out of the produce section entirely. 

Rhode Island wasn’t a segregated state, not legally, but she did notice that outside, passing black and Asian and Latina women cast that store long looks and did not enter. The white women within glanced at the windows, and their eyes passed over this and accepted it. 

After paying, she wheeled herself one-handedly out of the store while balancing her purse and grocery bag, and no fewer than five people tried to insist on carrying her things or pushing her chair. One man was so insistent that she had to shove his hand away and tell him to leave her; his expression swiftly grew ugly and he declared that she would die a lonely old bitch.

“That’s entirely possible,” she returned coolly as he stalked away

After that, she made it to the edge of the beach with no more interruptions, her house coming quickly into view. She arrived at the bottom of the ramp and ground her chair to a halt to reach into her purse for her keys, when all of a sudden she realized. 

A strange noise was arising from near the dock. Halfway between a human cry and an animalistic shriek, it lifted louder and louder, but nobody seemed to answer. Choking sobs interspersed with its cry, growing more panicked and hysterical, distressed and alone. 

She set her bags down on the front porch and rolled down the walkway. The cry grew louder as she approached, until she grew close enough to see him. Lying under the dock, his legs hidden in the water. 

The source of the cry was him, she realized in surprise. A bare-chested young man, with light brown skin and a long mane of thick wavy black hair, unusually long, nearly to his waist. He also had an elegant nose and high cheekbones and bright blue eyes with long lashes, and even though it was screwed up in distress, she saw that his face was quite lovely. He was strong too, with broad shoulders and a lean, narrow torso and well-muscled arms, like a gymnast. 

He had to be a few years younger than her, in his mid-twenties or so, and all of him from the shoulders down was tangled in a fishing net, completely bound. Not only that, but there were hooks in the net, visibly digging into his skin, leaving little trails of blood. 

He struggled more, and the hooks only dug further in; he keened, and the sound pierced her heart. 

“Hang on,” she called, and his head snapped up. He stopped crying, and blinked twice -- then stared at her in astonishment, as though he’d never seen anyone like her before. Her hands snapped defensively to her armrests; she forced herself to take a breath. “Hold still. If you do, I can cut you loose.”

_ How _ a man had gotten tangled in a net like that, like he was a seal or a dolphin, was beyond her, and she smarted from his open gawking, but she could hardly leave him like that. 

He grew still as she approached, her wheels sticking in the sand; she cursed angrily, pushing herself forward. From inside her jacket, she pulled out a standard-issue knife; she’d kept it from her days in the war, and kept it clean and sharp and still perfectly usable. She slid down from her chair, legs collapsing under her on the sand, and she grabbed a handful of the net, beginning to saw at it. 

The man tensed slightly as she pulled the first handful loose, then hissed through his teeth as she tugged the hooks from his skin. Thankfully, they hadn’t been in deep. 

“Hold still.”

He groaned slightly, but obeyed. 

It took nearly an hour, but eventually, she pulled the last of the net off him, yanking it away over the sand. He didn’t get to his feet, but instead rolled over onto his stomach, legs still in the water, leaning on his arms. 

“Thank you.” 

She was struck by his voice. It was slightly husky, like he didn’t speak English much, but melodic and soft. He looked directly at her as he spoke, and she saw, now that he wasn’t tangled in a net, that his handsome face and strong body were enough to steal a woman’s breath away, and she noted, almost absently, that his eyes were the same color as the clear sky. 

“What’s your name?” he continued, and she wondered when he was going to get up. She leaned slightly backwards against the sand, away from his inquisitive face. He grimaced slightly as she did, shifting in place, then brushing at his wounds.

“You need to go to a doctor,” she told him. “Those could get infected. You could get sepsis, or lockjaw.”

“No, I’ll be fine, thanks to you. I’m tougher than I look.” He grinned lopsidedly at her, and despite herself, she was almost swayed. “I’m Richard. I’m told I could also go by Dick.”

“...Barbara. Barbara Gordon.” With some difficulty, she backed up again and hoisted herself back into her wheelchair. “I’m serious. You can’t stay here.”

His smile flickered. 

“I know I can’t.” He glanced around furtively. “You’ve been kind to me, and I’m very grateful, but you’re not representative of  _ everyone _ here, are you?”

“What’s  _ that _ supposed to mean?” It came out harsher than she’d intended, and he looked innocently surprised. 

“I meant you’re safe. Safe to trust, to be around. Not everyone would react to me like you.”

She felt ashamed of herself for assuming the worst about what he meant, and then angry for being ashamed. She was well within her rights to be suspicious. 

He pushed his torso up again, balancing on his hands. The waves lapped at his waist, and he breathed softly. It was only then that Barbara noticed that there was something off about his hands...that his nails were unusually long, whitish and curved and sharp, like a cat’s claws. There seemed to be extra skin between his fingers as well, unusually translucent skin -- webbing. And when he spoke again, she saw that his canines were slightly longer than most people’s, and looked much sharper, reminding her strongly of sharks’ teeth.

“Thanks again,” he said gently, pushing backwards, sliding more of himself into the shallow water. “I suppose I’ll see you around?”

“Now wait just a minute,” she snapped, and he froze. “I went to all this trouble to free you, and you’re just going to ignore me about getting medical help? No. Absolutely not.”

He stared at her again for a moment. She thought, for that moment, that he would get angry or offended. 

Then he burst out laughing, and she had no idea how to react to  _ that _ . After he finished laughing, he made a soft chuffing noise, nothing she’d ever heard from a human before

“I will  _ definitely _ see you again,” he promised. 

Then he shoved off the sandbar and into the water, his feet pushing him off into the cove. 

No. Not  _ feet _ . 

Fins. 

For instead of legs, from the hips down he was encased in bright blue scales; with a long, powerful tail like a giant fish’s, accentuated by huge, translucent-blue fins. A few more scales were scattered over his waist and the small of his back, a few puckered scars on his tail had scraped them clean off, but the sight of his tail, of those thousands of scales that glittered in the spring sunlight like gems, stunned her into silence 

He swam out past the dock, then fins flipped upward as he dove, spraying a little wave into the air. 

Barbara sat there and stared after where he had been for almost five minutes straight. 

Even after she began moving again, finally got her wheels back onto the walkway and back towards her house, it was as though she were in a trance. She put her groceries away without thinking, fiddled with the radio dials absently before turning it off. Her cat clambered up onto the kitchen table, and she patted his head twice before wheeling around the house like she was pacing, getting sand all over the floor. 

Then she reached for the rotary phone next to the couch, almost yanking it off its cord, and dialed three numbers. 

As it was Sunday, Helena arrived from mass a quite long time after that. (God only knew why Dinah and Zinda were late.) But by early afternoon, the three other women had gathered at her house, Helena in her trousers and lilac blouse, Dinah in a blue blouse and black skirt, and Zinda in her typical black dress and jacket. She still had her Blackhawk badge pinned to the lapel of her favorite jacket, buffed and shined, even after five years. 

“Are you alright?” Dinah asked her, leaning forward on her knees, her blond hair shining. Helena was leaning backwards into the couch, by contrast, and Zinda lounged in the armchair with her knees splayed, like a man. “You look...haunted.”

“Have you been having war nightmares again?” Helena asked bluntly.

Unconsciously, her hand moved to the side of her waist at that. She shook her head, doing her best to snap out of her trance. 

“No, no it’s not that.”

The four women had, at first, been separate from each other during the war. Barbara and Helena had both been in the Women’s Army Corps, Barbara an infantrywoman and Helena a sniper, but they had been in different, segregated units. Zinda fought and flew with the famous Blackhawk Squadron, having been with the Air Force (no accounting for taste). Dinah, for her part, desperate for singing jobs -- not many would hire her, not when they found out what kind of woman she was -- had taken an opportunity with the USO, performing for the troops, and kept her personal life quiet. None of them had even met each other until 1944, on the German front, when three of them ended up on nearby bases from each other -- and all ended up in the same bar, watching Dinah sing. 

She had missed them terribly after she was honorably discharged, lying at home in bed waiting, being reduced to listening to the cheers on the radio as the war was declared over. 

“Frankly, I don’t think you’ll believe me even if I tell you.”

“Girl, either it’s really bad, or y’all are all worked up for no good reason, because you are as tense as a board,” Zinda piped up. 

“Yeah, you need a good man for that,” Helena remarked. 

“Or a good woman,” Dinah finished.

Barbara glared while Zinda loudly shushed the other two.

“Don’t say shit like that,” she said, attempting to press her fingers over Dinah’s mouth; Dinah slapped her away. “Y’all don’t know whether Hoover’s got the place tapped or not.”

“I’m sure J. Edgar Hoover has better things to do with his time than listen to Barbara read books all day,” Helena snarked. Barbara’s glare intensified. “Like, chase his tail all day trying to find communists and ending up his own ass, maybe.”

Well,  _ that _ was true.

“It has nothing to do with sex or romance,” she grumbled. “It’s much bigger than that.”

They all looked at her, still intrigued. 

She told them everything. But the skeptical looks on their faces, growing increasingly more so throughout, told her everything she needed to know about how plausible they thought it was. 

“I told you you wouldn’t believe me.”

“Would  _ you _ believe one of us?” Helena pointed out. Dinah and Zinda were still staring. “Come  _ on _ , Barbara. A  _ merman? _ ”

“I admit I wouldn’t believe it myself without proof,” Barbara sighed. She dropped her head onto her hands, leaning forward over her legs, elbows digging unfeelingly into her thighs. “And look, you don’t have to either. But I have nobody else to tell, and this feels unbelievably important…” She leveled a look at them. “So it doesn’t leave this room, okay? We have to keep it compartmentalized. Don’t tell a single soul.”

“‘Course not,” Zinda said reassuringly. “We don’t want y’all carted off to the asylum. We like you too much.”

“...Thanks.”

Dinah got to her feet and spread her hands. 

“Barbara, honey, I  _ want _ to believe you’re telling us the truth. I trust you. But…”

“But it’s just too fantastic, I get it.”

She offered to let them stay for dinner, and they accepted; Helena assisted her in making a minestrone soup, and perpetuated Zinda’s and Dinah’s lifelong ban from the kitchen by sending them to the local bakery to fetch a cheesecake. Through those few hours, she saw the other three women keep offering her side glances, as though they were trying to deduce, from her behavior, where her temporary lapse in judgement and sanity had come from. 

She simply kept moving, her knife slicing the vegetables rhythmically, her hand steady on the pot and spoon. She uncorked a bottle of Merlot and poured four glasses in turn, and gave no indication of insanity or delusion. 

The four of them ate their meal with the staticky radio on, listening to a sports announcer describe the latest Red Sox game. The cat ate his dinner, supplemented with bits of fresh fish, under the table, his long, fluffy tail brushing against their legs -- not that Barbara could tell. 

Once the soup and cake were gone, the four of them retreated to the front porch, still sipping their wine. Barbara listened, leaning back into her wheelchair, as the other three shared their gossip, chatting idly as though all were still normal. 

The sun dipped to the horizon as they talked, painting the sky gold. The sea glittered like a thousand jewels, just briefly, just before the sun vanished below the waves; the sky glowed pink just above the water, and further above, began to fade to deep blue. 

By the time the little fishing boats began to vanish from the darkening waves, Barbara heard the singing. 

Her friends stopped talking; she knew they heard it too. 

It rose above the beach, from over the water; strong, slightly throaty singing, either with no lyrics or in some language she did not know and could not comprehend. It made her breath catch and the hairs on her arms stand up, and every bit of her strained to listen more, to not miss a single note. 

Her mind went, as it often did, to the  _ Odyssey _ , of how Odysseus, lashed to his mast, had felt the pull of the song of the Sirens, how he’d begged his crew to let him go to them, even when it was wrong, even dangerous. That he would be killed, most likely at the Sirens’ hands, would be lost to the sea. 

Glancing over, she saw that the expressions on her friends’ faces were similarly enraptured, as though they were caught in a beautiful dream. 

“If I could sing like that…” Dinah murmured. 

The notes echoed across the waves, then faded; it was only then she shook herself out of the song, berating herself for her lapse, and her mind sharpened enough to realize. 

“It’s  _ him _ .”

“Who?”

The women peered over the porch railing just in time to pinpoint a head rising from the water, several yards from the edge of the dock. His hair streamed around his shoulders, pooling over the little, rippling waves, like a living thing, like he was part of the sea. At first he looked surprised to see more people, then he smiled, swimming a little closer to the shore. 

“Friends of yours?” he called.

“I don’t know,” she called back, ignoring her friends’ open staring, “Was the music show you?”

“Always!”

“Hey, excuse me.” Dinah got to her feet and walked to the edge of the porch, leaning over. When she yelled to him,  _ her _ voice echoed over the Sound too; Dick looked impressed. “Yeah,  _ you, _ random handsome strange man in the water. Who exactly are you?”

“Didn’t Barbara tell you about me?” He grinned playfully, treading his arms over the waves. “Anyway, you can consider me a friend. If she trusts you, then, y’know, it’s reasonable, I think, for me to trust you too.”

“Makes sense,” Zinda said. Helena stared at her. 

“ _ Nothing _ about this makes sense.”

“His name is Richard.” Barbara gestured with her empty wine glass. “But apparently we can call him Dick.”

“We tend to have human names from the places and cultures we live nearest to,” Dick agreed. He brushed a strand of black hair out of his eyes; it snagged briefly on one of his claws. He made a soft noise of exasperation that sounded to her ears like a seal’s huff. “Humans are...intriguing, but it’s kind of a bad idea for most of us to be around you very often. No offense.”

“None taken,” Zinda said.

“What in the actual god damn hell,” Dinah demanded, “are you talking about?”

Barbara bit her lip to keep down a smile. 

Dick tilted his head to the side, glancing back at Dinah. 

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to confuse you; I just wanted to let you understand.” He nodded to Barbara. “But I  _ do _ like her, and by extension, I think I can trust all of you.”

Her friends stared, but Barbara felt herself redden.

“Oh please. You barely know me.”

“Well, I tend to like people pretty easily.” He was still quite far away, but she could’ve sworn his lips twitched upwards. “But  _ especially _ you.”

Despite herself, Barbara felt her chest warm. 

Before her friends could say anything else, he turned downwards and dove, his head and shoulders vanishing under the seafoam. But even as he did, a pair of pale blue fins rose above the water, the tip of his tail glittering in the rosy glow of the sunset. His fins slashed through the top of a rising wave, spraying water before it too vanished. 

Her friends all turned and looked at her at the same time. Barbara sighed almost boredly, willing her blush to go away.

“He likes to do that,” she deadpanned.

They all turned back and looked at the ripples upon the water, just as the sun dipped below the horizon and the sky turned deep blue.

“Well…” Dinah said in a faint voice. “Call me a believer.”

* * *

Over the next couple weeks, she suddenly realized how often merfolk must haunt the edge of town; it had just become much easier for her to see one of them. Whenever she was near the ocean, even just on her way to work or the store, she kept seeing the glitter of his scales, considerably brighter flashes of blue than the sea around him. On a Thursday afternoon when the docks were almost abandoned, she even saw his head and shoulders surface; he lifted an arm to wave to her. Laughing in astonishment, she’d thrown one of the pieces of swordfish she’d just bought; he’d caught it deftly and waved it like a trophy.

“How’d you know I love swordfish?” he’d called.

“Actually, I was hoping you’d hate it,” she’d retorted, and he’d laughed in return and swam off, one of his fins slicing through the top of the water. When she returned to her home later, he waved from the sea outside. 

By all accounts his persistent friendliness should’ve annoyed her. 

Instead, she waved back. 

“Barbara,” one of the other, younger librarians said to her, not for the first time, while they were shelving a new shipment of Agatha Christies, “you can’t just let your life revolve around your work. You need a man in your life.”

_ Oh, if only you knew,  _ she thought, smirking faintly to herself.  _ Though technically, I only have  _ half _ a man in my life now.  _

“Barbara?” The younger girl peered at her around the cover of  _ A Murder Is Announced _ . “Are you listening?”

“Oh, I’m listening, I just don’t care.” She ran her finger down the spines of their Ray Bradbury collection. 

The younger girl faltered at that.

“But you can’t get by without a husband,” she then fretted. “You don’t want to be  _ just _ a librarian forever, do you? You’ll soon be too old to have children. Even crippled, I’m sure that you --”

Barbara stilled. The girl must’ve realized she’d made a mistake, because she gulped, and silenced.

“I’m not that much older than you,” Barbara said icily, “and ‘even crippled,’ I’m doing just fine for myself -- not that it’s  _ any _ of your business.”

She shoved the rest of the books in with unnecessary force and wheeled away. 

Zinda called her up later, and asked if she wanted to go see _ Sands of Iwo Jima  _ again. She agreed, and the two bought crab sandwiches for dinner, before slipping into the little local cinema. Zinda ignored the glass bottles of Coca-Cola for sale and snuck in glass bottles of beer instead; she’d always liked her drink, Zinda, but her liking of it had been greatly exacerbated by the war. Barbara, for her part, sipped carefully, watching the flickering screen, shuddering every time a shot went off, even though the sound was garbled by the whispery cinema speakers. It was close  _ enough _ to the real thing.

“Skipper, this was the Pacific Front, not the European. Shouldn’t bother you so much, and by the way, why do y’all come see this with me if it does?” Zinda asked halfway through. 

Barbara strongly suspected that the only reason it didn’t bother Zinda too was because she was already well on her way to drunk, but she didn’t say that. 

“My dad loves John Wayne movies,” she murmured. “He gets really excited when we can talk about them together; it’s sweet.”

“Ah. Yeah, he’s got a soft side, your dad.”

Her father had fought on the German front lines too, almost thirty years before she did. He’d been young, like her, and had been in the infantry, like her, both of them being promoted all the way up to Captain Gordon before the war ended, in his case, and before the damage was done by a Nazi bullet, in hers. 

Zinda embraced her to say goodbye, and Barbara went home alone. As soon as she arrived at her front porch, she buried her face in her hands, shuddering. Maybe, she thought, it would just be better to forget the war, like the rest of the country was so desperate to. To bury it in a pretty, picturesque suburban life, or in drink and cheer, like Zinda, or in work and in the arms of lovers, like Dinah and Helena. 

But Barbara Gordon was no damn good at forgetting.

“You’re crying,” came his voice. 

She hastily scrubbed at her cheeks, turning to face the water. Sure enough, he bobbed close to the shore, one hand resting on one of the dock’s wooden poles. 

“I’m not crying,” she snapped, wiping her eyes. “You’ll never see me cry, I promise.”

Dick backed up a bit, swimming away. But not retreating entirely. 

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Not unless you can erase memories. Besides, how would you know? Did you even know there was a war, a few years back --”

“Yes,” he said, surprising her. His expression looked grave, his voice hardened, surprising her further. He wasn’t, perhaps, as happy-go-lucky as he acted. “I saw the men leaving this cove, and I saw how many of them returned. I saw the ships, the submarines.”

He grasped the side of the dock and hauled himself out entirely. Barbara turned onto the walkway, and, cautious, rolled closer, her wheels rattling slightly on the wooden boards. 

He gazed up at her, extending his tail across the boards. Now that she was closer, and now that it wasn’t in the water , she could see the full extent of the old damage done to it, jagged scars that had sliced off lines of his scales, the marks that marred the beautiful blue. There was an old tear dipping into one of his fins, there were countless marks on his bare upper body that indicated damage like what she had experienced in battle. 

She instinctively reached out a hand, then retracted it. 

“What happened?”

“Navy training activity. Underwater explosives; the shrapnel caught my tail. Here, I got scraped against the side of a ship. Here, a propeller got me.”

“No wonder you were so cavalier about that net,” she murmured. 

“Right, exactly.”

She waited for him to ask her about her legs, but he didn’t. He simply shuffled to the edge of the dock, sliding his tail back over, just sitting there and letting his fins dip below the surface. 

She noticed that the late afternoon had stretched into evening, and the shadows were growing longer. 

“How can you trust me so easily then?” she asked. “If humans have hurt you before? You must know, if you were ever caught…”

“I’d be killed, or sent to a...what do you call them? Government facility? To be studied, who knows in what ways. We’re terrified of those, yeah.” He blinked slowly. “But like I said: you had the opportunity to leave me in that net, and then you had the opportunity to call your government on me. But you didn’t.”

“Oh.” She dipped her head. “Well, um...yeah. I guess not.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes. The sun dipped lower, and he moved his fins a bit through the water, watching the tide recede from the shore. 

“Can I ask you another question?” 

“Sure.”

“How do you speak English so well?”

He started, then laughed again, his expression clearing. 

“Is that all? Well, the thing is, I don’t directly interact with a lot of humans, obviously, but I’ve lived near this cove for years now, so I do hear you all a lot -- and sometimes I even listen.” His eyes crinkled as he smiled again, and she felt a little better, seeing that. “My sire, he’s had five other pups since me; you should’ve seen how quickly they picked up on you people’s curse words.”

“Sweet Jesus. Five younger siblings? And I thought just having one younger brother was bad.” She leaned slightly back in her chair.

“Well, they don’t live here, but yes.” He absently ran one claw down the wood of the dock. “They’re not pups anymore, though. The two oldest of them are only a few years younger than me; they even have mates now.”

“Do you --?” She held up her hands, shaking her head. “I must sound very impertinent.”

“What? Oh. No. Not to me.” He inclined his head towards her. “You can go ahead and ask.”

“Well, alright. Do you have a...mate?”

Dick deflated slightly. He looked down, staring at the water. 

“I haven’t...not in a couple years.”

“Oh. I see.”

“Do you?”

Barbara laughed derisively at the idea; he looked confused. 

“Ha.  _ Definitely _ not. Nothing that lasted, anyway.”

Dick made a soft humming, trilling noise in his throat. 

“Why not?”

She was startled into silence by the question. He looked intently at her, and she realized all at once that he was completely serious. That he genuinely did not know why someone would not want to be with her. 

“I...I don’t…” She cleared her throat, shoving down her sudden burst of emotions. “It’s not important.”

He made that soft sound again, and reached up to brush his hair off his shoulders, over his back instead. She saw as he did, for the first time, the small slits of gills on his neck. They fluttered slightly with each breath, and once again, she could not help but marvel.

She pondered the fact that he could alternate between breathing water and breathing air. No other mammal could... _ were _ merfolk mammals? They had hair, obviously, but were they warm-blooded? Did they nurse their young? Did they give birth to live babies, or did they lay eggs?

“I’m glad you don’t mind my questions,” she said suddenly.

“No, I don’t. I understand, we don’t know very much about each other, do we?”

She finally smiled again.

“Not for long.”

His next trill sounded more pleased; he slid back off the dock again with a  _ splash _ . She rolled right to the edge; he braced his hands on the edge, just below her feet. 

“I’ll be off from work again tomorrow afternoon,” she said. “Can you be here by then?”

“Without a doubt.”

Even as he left, a little of the old ache eased. 

* * *

The next afternoon, she wheeled to the dock with a basket full of food and something to read, while she waited. When he emerged, tail flashing under the water, she set her book down on the dock and began unpacking dinner. 

But he reached up and tapped, with one claw, the cover of  _ The Complete Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales.  _

“What’s this?”

She picked it up again, running her hand down the cover gently. 

“This is one way we humans collect stories. We write them down, print them, to be read later as many times as we want, sometimes by very many people.”

Barbara noticed the way his tail flicked pensively, the curious expression on his face. 

“Can I hear one?”

She opened the book, glancing down at the page she’d been on, and suddenly felt embarrassed.

“You might think this one’s silly.”

“Try me.”

The wind fluttered her skirts as she cleared her throat, pushing through her self-consciousness. 

_ “ _ _ Far out in the ocean, where the water is as blue as the prettiest cornflower, and as clear as crystal, it is very, very deep; so deep, indeed, that no cable could fathom it: many church steeples, piled one upon another, would not reach from the ground beneath to the surface of the water above. There dwell the Sea King and his subjects…” _

Silly or not, it didn’t matter. As she read, Dick’s eyes didn’t leave her the entire time.

* * *

It was only a few days later that he told her more of his family. She shared with him a dinner of scallops and he mentioned something about one of his brothers loving them. 

“So you have how many brothers?”

“Four,” he confirmed. She ate garlicky, herb-scented linguine with her seared scallops, while he devoured his raw. “And one sister.”

“Must’ve been a crowded cave, growing up.”

“Ah, no. Fairly  _ un _ crowded cave, actually. Our sire didn’t start getting the rest of them until I was already grown.”

She frowned.

“But a couple days ago you said two of them were only a little younger than you.”

Dick suddenly looked self-conscious, picking at the edge of his scallop. It was a moment before he spoke again. 

“Most of us aren’t really his,” he mumbled. 

“...I’m sorry?”

“He didn’t really sire most of us. Only Damian, the youngest. The rest of us lost our sires and dams, in one way or another, and he took us in to live with him.”

“Why are you ashamed of that?”

“I’m not.” He fidgeted. “I’m glad to have the family I have. I care very much about them. But taking pups in is something only couples who can’t have any of their own do. If you want them, you go out, find a mate, and you have them yourself. Others think it’s strange, what he did; question  _ why _ he did it.”

Barbara bit off another mouthful of dinner, trying to decide how best to respond. 

“People thought it was strange when  _ my _ father did it, too,” was what came out.

“What?”

She took a deep breath, surprised at herself. 

“I’m not biologically  _ my _ father’s child, either. When my parents died, he took  _ me _ in too.”

Dick looked astonished. 

“Frankly, I say fuck what people think.  _ I _ think I’m better for it.” She smiled faintly. “He’s much better for me than they ever were.”

He was quiet for a moment more. 

“My sire and dam were good,” he said quietly. “They were good to each other, and to me. But you’re right. Bruce has raised me and been in my life since I was just a pup. He makes me furious sometimes --”

“ _ All _ parents do that.”

He let out a chuffing laugh. 

“True. But he’s  _ especially _ good at that...anyway, the point is, no matter what, I wouldn’t take back my life with him and the others. They’re my pod.”

“Well, there you go.”

His smile grew; he finished his dinner, washing his hands and face in the water. 

“What about you? Do you have any siblings?”

Barbara’s good mood evaporated. She glowered down at her plate, her dinner suddenly churning in her gut. 

“I like to pretend that I don’t,” was all she said. 

“Why?”

“Because I’m better off another way:  _ without _ him  _ or _ my mother in my life.”

Dick looked like he wanted to ask more about her...but was silenced by the thunder in her expression. 

* * *

Her best patrons at the library were almost exclusively children and other women.

Children, in her experience, tended to turn to the family television set or radio when their parents scolded them for reading. For reading comic books, for reading books they thought were unladylike, for reading fiction or nonfiction or pulp fiction or science fiction. So her heart lifted to see children that eagerly scoured her shelves, picking out sometimes  _ the _ strangest or most unlikely books, and she was happy to check them out for them. 

Grown women were more tentative. Housewives whose husbands were at work, nervous about picking books that could potentially bring disapproval down on their heads -- which seemed to be almost  _ any _ book. Picking out anything, whether to learn for themselves or just simply for fun after a day of exhausting work, was, to them, a triumph. 

Information, and access to it, especially in their new modern age, a dawning age of intolerance and secrecy and suspicion, restrictive laws and the Russians both hanging over everyone’s heads, seemed monumentally important to her. Even if it was just in regards to Mrs. Hemmings and her daughter Sally looking for books about snakes. 

But many of the patrons gave Helena a wide berth when she came in with her class. 

“Pick out anything you want,” Helena said gamely to the children, and they took off all at once; there was nothing children loved more than the phrase  _ pick out anything you want _ . 

But some of the mothers grabbed and pulled their own children closer when Helena’s children came near. 

It was true, Rhode Island wasn’t a segregated state. But though she was well-off on family money, Helena taught at a poorer school, a school that served children from what suburbanites called “the wrong side of the tracks,” and it just so happened that, like Helena, many of those children happened to not be white. Worse, Helena’s mother had been black, but her father had been Italian, and again, while this was no longer  _ illegal _ in that particular state...well. She would’ve had to be blind to not see the way people had always looked at her friend. 

“Don’t you have libraries in your part of town?” one of the women asked with syrupy sweetness. 

“They don’t have enough books to serve my students’ needs.”

“Look, we don’t want any trouble,” said another. “But you  _ cannot _ bring those kids in here, not with my children.”

“And what exactly is wrong with ‘those kids’?” Helena challenged. “Don’t tell me it’s because they’re poor. Don’t tell me they’re bad influences. Tell me why you  _ really _ don’t like them.”

Barbara both marveled at Helena’s courage and was instantly worried. 

“Kids,” she said to the students, who were instantly attentive. “C’mere, come check out your books.”

They all grouped in front of her desk, eagerly waving their choices in the air. They were so young, so excited, forgetting the tension in their air in lieu of their passion. 

“I got this one, Miss Barbara, I got this one.”

“Mine’s here!”

“I wanna read  _ this _ one.”

She checked each out as quickly as she could. If the other women tried to call the police, if the security guards tried to expel Helena and her students, she at least wanted to make sure those kids got every single one of the books they wanted. 

“-- your colored children do  _ not _ belong here. Kindly leave, before we call the police.” That woman turned to Barbara. “You’ll let us use the phone, won’t you? To call the police?”

“ _ No _ ,” Barbara snapped, and she relished the looks of dumbfounded shock on their faces. 

“You do  _ not  _ have to protect me, Barb. It’s fine.” Helena faced the other patrons. “Rhode Island is not a segregated state. We stay.”

The last of her students obtained his book, and Helena put a hand on his shoulder. Barbara put her hand over the phone receiver, so that nobody could reach for it, glaring, daring them to try. 

Several of the others reluctantly left, shuffling off. Several shot nasty glares at Helena and the children as they did. 

But the children sat down with their books to start reading, and the looks of joy on their faces warmed her, and they and their teacher stayed. 

“ _ Grazie a Dio, _ ” Helena murmured to herself, and Barbara agreed. 

* * *

When she returned home, she was about to head right into her house, past the dock. 

That was, until she saw him, sitting on it, tail trailing below him in the shallows. 

Three glass shards embedded in his back. 

He made soft keening noises as he reached behind him, struggling to reach the glass in his skin, to pull it out. 

Barbara gasped in horror, rolling at once down the walkway to him. He turned in surprise, looking at her. 

“Oh my God, Dick, what happened?”

He shifted in place, then winced, suppressing another keen. 

“Beer bottle. A human man threw a beer bottle.”

“Fucking...fucking Christ. Dick, c’mere; I gotta take you inside.”

There was no other way; she steeled herself. Then she opened her arms, inviting him to be carried. 

Without hesitating, he hoisted himself up, moving into her arms. He carefully positioned himself so that the glass would not dig in deeper, breathing deep. The curve of his tail brushed against her hand.

She wheeled hastily back to her house, ignoring the touch of his skin, his scales, ignoring the blood seeping onto her blouse. She quickly shut the door behind them, snatching an old towel and her first-aid kit from the bathroom and laying the towel, then him, across the couch. 

Her cat padded into the living room and sniffed at Dick’s fins, meowing. Before she could do anything, Dick snatched the cat up by his scruff and bared his teeth; both hissing. 

“Your home seems to be infested.”

Despite the situation, she had to choke down a strangled laugh. 

“He’s my pet.” 

“Pet…?”

“An animal that you keep in your house, for companionship -- hey, Odie.  _ Odysseus. _ Stop that.”

Odie reluctantly stopped trying to bite Dick’s fingers. Dick, for his part, set him down; he immediately stalked off with his tail in the air, Dick eyeing him the whole way. 

“And if you try to eat him, I  _ will  _ immediately kick you out.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t.” He shifted in place as she brushed his long hair over his shoulders, looking at the wounds. “Too much fur.”

“And please, no jokes. Not now.”

The soft intensity of her voice made him tense slightly, but he did go quiet. 

Carefully, Barbara plucked each piece of glass from his skin. He hissed as she applied iodine to the cuts, but was oddly still as she cleaned a needle and began to stitch them shut. She supposed he wasn’t used to the sting of disinfectant, but wounds, punctures... _ those _ he had experienced plenty of. The thought suddenly made her angry.

“Why did someone throw a beer bottle at you?”

“I was swimming near the public beach. This woman, I don’t know if you know her, she was pale, with very light hair, and she ended up swimming a little close to me -- oh, don’t worry, nobody saw my tail. But anyway, she started flirting with me, I think. At least, that’s the way her mate took it. Big man, pasty-faced, thin hair. He was on a boat nearby, and he shouted at me, told me to stay away from his wife because he knew what all colored men were like.  _ Then _ he threw the bottle. Probably just trying to scare me, since the bottle hit a rock, not my back, but...a few pieces flew off when it shattered.”

“Asshole,” she breathed. She tied off the last stitch and sliced through it, angrily picking up the reddened glass shards to throw away. His blood stained her white towel, her white blouse, the white skin of her fingers. There was going to be no getting it out. “I’ll be back. Just give me a moment.”

She discarded the glass, washing her hands in the sink, before shaking them off as best she could and going to change. Safely in her room, she stripped off her blouse, down to her skirt and brassiere, hand glancing over her exposed bullet scar. Shuddering, Barbara hastily pulled on a new blouse and reemerged, looking for Dick, to see how he was doing. 

He was sprawled across her couch, the end of his tail draped over the armrest, looking sorrowful, listless. 

She rolled up to him, resting her hand on his shoulder. 

“Is there…” She faltered, suddenly feeling in the dark. “Is there anything else I can do?”

His fins curled slightly. 

“You don’t have to go to the trouble, Barbara. You’ve been kind enough to me, really.”

“Now  _ that _ sounds like bullshit to me.”

She wheeled to her bathroom, turning the groaning, rusted knobs so that cool water flowed. The kitchen was next, to fetch a box of salt, till the water was heavy, briny. 

This time, when she carried him, she could not help but feel the smooth texture of his scales, the gentle curve of each, patterning into each other. His core ran hotter than any other human she’d met, his skin warming hers with the slightest touch. He made soft noises of contentment as he saw the water, shifting in her lap; for some reason, she felt her face heat up, felt her pulse quicken. They were so close to one another, his heart seemed to beat with hers; she felt it as well as her own. 

He groaned with satisfaction as he slid into the water, tail draping over the edge. A little of the tightness in her chest eased, though, for some reason, when he began to look happy again, her heartbeat didn’t slow down. 

“I owe you,” he told her, shifting. The water sloshed around him.

“You don’t owe me anything. It’s only a small bathtub.”

One clawed hand reached up and took hers. His palms were rough, and his claws felt strange to the touch, but she interlocked her fingers with his anyway, watching as he closed his eyes. Wounded, completely exposed, he still lay there before her, not a trace of fear in his expression anymore. 

She felt very, very unworthy of the magnitude of his trust. 

* * *

May melted into June, and the heat of summer seeped into the air. 

Barbara now often spent her afternoons laid out on the dock or the beach, reading aloud or talking, so much that she bought a new swimming costume. She lay out on her towel, hat shielding her eyes and her cheeks from burning, and he would soon join her. She read aloud from Gertrude Stein and Zora Neale Hurston and Pearl S. Buck and Virginia Woolf, and he listened, enthralled, only interrupting to ask what a word or phrase meant. 

Or sometimes they would both lay out across the sand, or he would swim in the shallows while she dipped her unfeeling feet in the water, and just talk. She told him about her childhood, growing up in Chicago and Gotham City, and he described the beauty of the deep, open ocean, the many creatures and plants and corals; the cityscapes, the deep continental slopes.

She explained human world affairs as best as she could to him, and sometimes he nodded in understanding. Or sometimes, he would look confused, undo her description of politics and bloodshed by just asking “why?”

“Merfolk don’t fight like that?”

“We do, sometimes. But it’s mostly individual, over hunting territory or mates or things like that. I’ve never heard of any of my people killing...millions.” 

She thought of the day she heard the announcement of the war in the Pacific ending, of Japan surrendering after what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She thought of how she’d felt when she found out about what the Nazis she’d fought had truly been doing to the Jews, the Romani, the Slavs, the political dissenters, the queers...and to the handicapped. 

“I wish I could claim the same for my own people,” she said softly.

He momentarily flinched, and her chest hurt. But then he took a deep breath, and took her hand again. She ran her thumb over his knuckles, feeling his warmth again, and turned her gaze to the horizon. 

Later,  _ Dream A Little Dream Of Me  _ and  _ I Only Have Eyes For You _ played on her little radio as she chopped vegetables for dinner and stared out the window at the golden light on the waves. She fed Odie a slip of fish from the refrigerator and stroked over her cat’s head, and thought of the life she’d lived, and of the unfathomable depths of the sea. 

* * *

She called Gotham City that night, and the familiar poor connection crackled in her ears -- but she tolerated it, for soon afterwards her father’s voice came through.

“Nice night in Rhode Island?”

He sounded as tired as Barbara always felt, but she was still happy to hear him. 

“Pretty picturesque, Dad. You never get this many stars out in Gotham. Or as few murders.”

“I’ll still take my chances here.”

The two of them chatted idly for some time, describing the events of the last couple weeks or so. She was lulled into a kind of comfort, like when she was a little girl and she talked about school and he about work, and he still took her to the soda fountain on the street corner every Friday afternoon for milkshakes.

Then he startled her out of her lull. 

“Do you remember Jason?”

“Jason? Which Jason?”

“ _ Your  _ Jason, kiddo. The P.I.”

She swallowed hard.

“My ex? What about him?”

“He’s been asking about you.”

Her hands froze on the receiver and phone cord. 

“What did...what did you tell him?”

“That no, you weren’t married, but also that no, you weren’t looking for anyone --”

“Good,” she said with a little too much force. “I don’t need Jason, or anyone, asking after my hand. I don’t care what fucking  _ Good Housekeeping _ has to say, I don’t need any of what these men have to offer me. I’m not going to be their fucking homemaker. I don’t have that kind of material in me.”

“Barbara, again, I told him  _ no _ .” Jim huffed, then coughed abruptly; decades of smoking echoing down the line. “You don’t have to snap at me.”

She faltered again. Then let out a long, soft sigh.

“You’re right. I’m sorry, Dad.”

“I know you’re not...it’s hard to share a life with someone who doesn’t understand you, or what you’ve been through.”

Both of them were silent for a moment, as she knew he spoke from experience.

“Which reminds me,” she said, trying for a lighter tone, “how’s Sarah?”

It warmed Barbara how, even after years, Jim still audibly brightened while talking about Sarah. It would be nice, maybe, to be able to love like that again someday. 

“She’s taking the weekend to see friends in New York, but then after that, I have a reservation for both of us at O’Leary’s this Tuesday…”

Barbara let her father talk about the woman he loved for as long as he wanted, until the moon glimmered high above the calm surface of the sea. She let him say goodbye first, before she hung up and went to her bedroom, slipping into sleep almost as soon as she closed her eyes. 

* * *

_ She screamed, but no sound came out.  _

_ Sprawled on a German field, gunshots and blasts echoing around her, echoing -- _

_ A Nazi soldier bent over her with his gun in hand, calmly observing her bleeding out onto the grass, her hand clutching her side where the bullet had ripped through her flesh, had shattered her bone. Tears streamed down her face, but she couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. _

_ He grinned maniacally down at her, for a moment, just a moment, his face flashing between all the faces of all his compatriots, every one of them she’d ever seen. _

_ “Hold still, darling. Aren’t you glad you’re alive? That at least it didn’t kill you? At least, only killed half of you. Dead legs like that don’t deserve such prettiness on top...can you still live without your eyes...or your tits...or that cold, closed off heart of yours…?” _

_ She was suddenly in a lab, naked and stretched out on a table with lights glaring in her eyes. She looked to the side, and in a glass jar, still beating, was her heart. She touched her chest and her side, and they were both still bloody, her ribs and spine poking through her bloody red flesh in little broken white spikes, like Greek ruins, her back a crumbling column.  _

_ Other people’s screams and cries echoed from the rest of the lab, the cries of millions. War prisoners, their own neighbors, did it matter to them which it was? _

_ Doctors with the unnatural lights in their eyes bent over her, scalpels in hand, ready to reenact whatever was creating that chorus of screams. _

_ Then she was in a hole in the ground, a grave, and instead of doctors, a thousand ordinary people with ordinary faces stood on the ground above her. She could not tell which country they were from. They each had a shovel of dirt in hand.  _

_ She tried to scream again as her body snapped in half under the weight of the earth, as her blood all left her body and her mouth filled with the first shovelful of dirt.  _

* * *

In the morning, as she passed the harbor on her way to the market, she saw a different glint in the water.

Barbara rolled closer to the water’s edge, in between the bobbing sailboats, until she saw the face of a girl, hiding behind the shadow of an orange-and-white hull. 

“You know Dick too, huh?” she asked softly. 

The girl nodded. She looked about nineteen or twenty, with tangled, choppy black hair and almond-shaped dark eyes. She was bare-chested, her skin laced with scars, just like Dick. Her claws bit slightly into the hull of the boat, and she peered up at Barbara with a mix of curiosity and awe. 

“Are you his friend? Or his sister?”

The girl cleared her throat, then coughed. 

“Sis...ter.” It seemed difficult for her to speak. “Came to see...you.”

Barbara inclined her head. The girl didn’t break her gaze, tilting her head, almost owllike; there was a flicker of movement under the water.

“He says...you are strong. Tough. In-telli-gent. Lovely. Our sire is cautious. Sus-picious.”

She reeled, then stared.

“Dick says  _ what  _ about me?” Her heart hammered in her chest. “Wait, wait, no nevermind. That -- that’s not important. Your sire, he’s -- he’s suspicious? Well, I can’t say I blame him, that’s probably the smart thing to be.”

She nodded. Barbara exhaled softly.

“Sister...I remember. You’re Cassandra, yes?”

Another nod. 

“Alright. Look, I can’t talk long, but is your brother okay?”

“Yes.”

“Alright. Then why are you here?” she asked bluntly. “Why are you talking to me?”

Cassandra blinked slowly. Some feet away from her, a pair of narrow black fins poked slightly from the surface. 

“He vou-ches for you. Talks about you. Want-ed to see...if it was true.” She eyed Barbara’s bare arms, still corded with muscle from swimming, from chin-ups and push-ups on long nights when she couldn’t sleep without nightmares. Eyed the old battle scars. “You  _ are _ strong, I see.” Then her black eyes glinted. “But have...an att-i-tude pro-blem.”

Barbara stared at her for a minute.

Then she actually smirked, albeit dryly.

“You’ve got the measure of me, Cassandra. Are you gonna swim back and tell your sire and podmates that, huh?”

“Gonna be nic-er.” Cassandra grinned a bit, showing a glint of sharp white teeth. “You seem good.” She rested one clawed hand against her chest. “Good judge of...charact-er.”

Then she dove, her deep black tail, flashed through with gold like an ore within a mine, flicking upwards as she did.

Barbara laughed again.

“Well. I guess  _ that _ runs in the family.”

* * *

Afternoon came, and she made her way back to her house to change. Summer had truly come, and the sun beat down, permeating through her home, only tempered by the stiff, salty sea breeze. 

She slid out of her dress and into her bathing costume -- and, on a whim, picked out a pair of diving goggles as well. This time, when she reached the dock, she eased herself out of her chair to the wooden planks, and then, into the cool, briny shallows. 

It was some effort to tread water with just her arms, but she’d had plenty of practice. She took a moment to get used to the chill…

Then she dove, her hair billowing out around her as she did. At first, she was still close enough to shore that sand swirled around her and made her vision murky, but as she swam further out, the water cleared. Sunlight streamed around her, piercing the gloom, bathing her in flecks of gold. 

When Barbara surfaced to catch her breath, she was quite far from the shore, past the chipped safety buoys dotted with seagulls. Below her, darkness swirled, the silty bottom too far down to see. 

For a little while, she simply rested, her head above water, gazing out at the sky and the town in the distance. 

Then she pulled her head below water again and was instantly surrounded by color. 

She yelped, releasing a cloud of bubbles, as the faces around her registered. Two big males, two smaller young males, two older females, two younger, and a little male child. All of them except two of the females -- a redhead and a blonde, respectively -- had black hair.

One of the big males, the younger one, had a mottled crimson-and-vermillion tail, one of his fins shredded, his tail marred with a long scar. The first of the smaller males had a red tail too, shot through with black, fins streaked with charcoal; a round scar marked his upper abdomen. The second had a bright yellow tail, also shot through with black, he looked much less worn than the others. Of the two older females, the redheaded one had a black tail and fire-red fins, the other one’s black tail was shot through with deep violet and she had longer, sharper-looking claws. The child had a bright green tail, his fins streaked with orangey-red. The other big male looked like the oldest; his powerful tail was the only monocolor one, a deep, pure black, only broken up by his many, many scars. One of the younger females, the blonde, had a bright purple tail highlighted with golden yellow and lilac fins, old silvery stretch marks webbing across her belly. The last younger female Barbara recognized. 

Cassandra waved slightly, then turned to the rest of her family and let out a series of slow chirping, clicking noises. Around her, the rest of the merfolk stared in astonishment, then all began to talk amongst themselves at once; their clicks and whistles and huffs and occasional squeals reminding Barbara of seal calls, of dolphin chatter. 

She surfaced for breath, and they all surfaced with her. 

“You know…” she managed to say, trying to address the whole fascinated family at once, “usually when I meet a man’s family, I’m a little better -- and a little  _ more _ \-- dressed.”

“Her jokes  _ do _ sound like she’s been spending a lot of time with our Richard,” the little child remarked dryly. The big, black-tailed male, whom she understood had to be the pod’s patriarch, the oft-mentioned adoptive father of Dick and his siblings, huffed and let out a soft  _ hrm _ sound of agreement. 

“Oh, Damian, Bruce, grow a sense of humor, both of you,” the blonde girl chuckled. 

Like Dick, they spoke English as a second language, interspersed with their own nonverbal, wordless tongue. Barbara turned as best she could, taking them all in, the many different faces and tails alike, the green and blue and brown eyes, the clicking tongues between sharp fangs. 

“Let’s see. Bruce, Damian, Cassandra, obviously. Duke, Timothy. Jason, Katherine, and Selina. And…” She looked at the blonde girl. “Okay, you’re not a sibling, a cousin, a father, or a father’s mate. I don’t know you.”

She chirped softly, swishing her tail. 

“Didn’t Dick say anyone was close to his sister?”

“Yes. He said that about a certain Stephanie...”

“Well, didn’t he also say that Bruce was ‘close’ with Selina?”

“Yeh -- oh.  _ Oh. _ I see.”

The other suddenly looked nervous. A few of them hissed softly. 

“Don’t tell her that. Humans don’t take well to that.”

The two mermaids swam a little closer, staring defiantly, and Barbara felt for them, felt an odd rush of pride for those young girls. They could never be open about it if they were humans, but in the ocean, they were free. 

“I’m not like other humans in that, Jason.”

And not just because she’d read Alfred Kinsey. 

“So…” Bruce began. He eyed her, still looking stone-faced. “You know about us. How do we know to trust you? Why have you not told anyone beside three human women about us?”

Barbara looked back at the mer family, the fascinated faces, the apprehensive ones. All looking at her in expectation.

“Because someone would come kill or lock up all of you if I did.”

“And why do you care?”

“Bruce…” the others muttered. 

“No.  _ Why? _ ”

“Because I don’t like destruction and pain directed at innocents, okay?” she snapped. Bruce actually started. “I protect, I preserve things. And I can see a future where I just tell the world about you all, and it involves the mass killing or imprisonment of sentient, intelligent individuals who are thought of as inhuman. And I’ve seen enough of that already.”

The family all looked at her a while longer. 

Stephanie spoke up again.

“Well, I’m convinced.” At her side, Cassandra’s mouth twitched up. 

“Alright,” Jason said brightly. “We won’t need to drown and eat her after all.”

Bruce groaned; Barbara swam up and took Jason by the cheek, looking directly into his eyes.

“And since you didn’t try to,  _ I _ won’t need to put you on a hook and scale you and tell the fishmonger you’re a really big halibut,” she replied sweetly. 

His siblings laughed so hard that Damian choked on a mouthful of water, and Barbara knew that she belonged. 

* * *

Two of the three men who swaggered up to her while she was leaving work were walking slightly behind the third, nudging their friend forward. Easy prey, he was clearly thinking. Unmarried, but not a young girl with her whole life ahead of her; she must be approaching thirty, getting desperate. Her desperation, he clearly figured, could only be exacerbated by the fact of her wheelchair, which meant that nobody could possibly want her. 

His clothes were nice, and his shoes were Oxfords, but she doubted very much that he had such honest intentions as actual courting for her. 

“You look tired, doll,” he greeted her. “Long day?”

Barbara said nothing in reply, but he smirked. 

“Seems like it. Pretty thing like you shouldn’t be stuck behind a desk all day, but resting in a nice home, with a man to take care of you.”

She bit the inside of her cheek nearly hard enough to draw blood, desperately resisting the urge to say what she wanted to say. 

“I’m quite fine behind a desk, sir. Now if you’ll excuse me, sir, I have a dinner date tonight, and I have to go home to prepare right now.”

He caught her wrist before she could leave. 

“Whoever he is,” he breathed into her ear, “I’m sure I can make you forget him. I have enough money to give you anything you want...you still feel anything below your waist, doll? With me, I  _ know _ you’ll feel something.”

His friends grinned. Disgust coiled in Barbara’s throat.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to pass,” she managed to spit out. All three men started, then stared incredulously. 

“Whah --  _ nobody _ says no to me.”

“I believe I just did. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

Before she could wheel away, he grabbed her wrist, shoving her chair bodily towards the road; a car missed her by less than a yard. She yelped, terrified, and nearly fell over; he and his friends jeered.

“Try and learn a little lesson about gratitude, bitch.”

The words had barely left his mouth before she turned around and drove her fist against his torso, up into his diaphragm. He let out a long, disbelieving wheeze of agony, collapsing, his friends gathering around him at once.

Before he could recover, she turned and left as quickly as she could. When she got home, she shut the door and locked and bolted it, before slumping down in her chair, sighing. 

June was almost over, so that evening, the white-gold sun was still out, and would stay out a good long time; the air was still warm. She hastily prepared the food, slid it into the oven, and shooed Odie out of the kitchen, then carefully checked the window before rolling out to the dock. 

Dick was already there, looking up and brightening at once. His tail fins swished through the surface of the water, churning it to foam. 

Then he looked, and frowned. 

“I thought you said we’d be having dinner together.”

“And we will,” she promised. Then: “But tonight, we’re having it in my house.”

His mouth fell slightly open. 

“And don’t worry. I happen to have a spare wheelchair.”

* * *

It took a surprisingly short time for him to figure out how to work the wheelchair, before he followed her up and into her house. He looked so excited to be able to move freely on land, to gaze about her house again. He ran a finger over her bookshelves, pressed a hand to her blue-painted walls, and, when Odie jumped up onto his lap, even ran a hand down the purring cat’s back.

“You know he only likes you now because you smell like fish, right?”

“So I figured.” He paused. “You know, you made a big impression on my pod -- my family.”

“Oh?”

“They all like you. Stephanie and Cassandra won’t stop talking about you. Timothy keeps asking when you’ll come back. Selina says what you lack in real claws and fangs, you make up for with metaphorical ones. And Bruce is kind of  _ grudgingly _ impressed by you, but still.”

Her chest warmed; she bent her head, smiling.

“Well, I’ll take it.”

With one hand, only turning himself in circles a few times, Dick curiously wheeled over to the television set, turning the dial, clicking through  _ Break The Bank, The Frank Sinatra Show, _ and  _ Dangerous Assignment. _

“Oh don’t do that. That stuff rots your brain, you know.”

She rolled over and saw that he had stopped at a different program; the flickering black-and-white screen showing a couple talking lovingly with each other, standing so close to one another their figures blurred into one. Dick looked strangely enthralled with the image; he had suddenly gone very still. 

“What are they doing with their fingers?” he asked softly. “I’ve seen other human couples do that, when they walk along the docks or the beach together.”

“Holding…” For some reason, her chest fluttered. She cleared her throat. “Holding hands. It’s an expression of affection to us, of l--”

The man and woman onscreen wrapped each other up in an embrace, moving into a kiss; which made Barbara feel strange, something she’d never felt before when seeing these things. Dick blinked slowly, entranced. 

“I’ve seen humans do  _ that _ too,” he murmured. “Love?”

“It’s meant to be an expression of...love, yes.”

“It looks really nice.”

“Yes. It can be.”

Barbara’s throat hitched, and she turned away. Her heartbeat had sped up; she braced a hand to her chest. 

It didn’t slow as she took the fish and potatoes out of the oven, as Dick pulled himself away from the TV to happily gorge himself and praise her cooking, as he tried a sip of her wine and gagged, making her giggle. No, through it all her heart still thundered. 

“So tell me again, about your parents. Where are they from?”

“Which ones?” She’d bought creme brulee from the bakery this time, and he was fascinated with the burnt sugar crust, tapping his claw lightly against it. “Bruce’s ancestors, they swam across the ocean hundreds of years ago, from these little islands...I think you’d call them the British Isles. Selina’s sire did too, but her dam came from the warm waters in the south, a different island...” He clicked softly, trying to remember. “Cuba, you’d call it. Anyway, Selina isn’t Damian’s dam, she didn’t become Bruce’s mate until fairly recently. She -- Talia -- is from across the sea, far to the east.”

“Your birth parents?” she prompted gently.

His expression became slightly melancholy, but he kept talking anyway. 

“We’re from the north waters of what you would call the Arabian Sea, off the coast of India. Over centuries, we swam north, through your Red Sea, to the waters around Europe, and then, across the ocean to America.” He sighed softly. “There were humans like us, who migrated like we did, because their fellows kept killing them or chasing them out.”

On instinct, without thinking, she took his hand. His eyes grew wide for a moment...but he accepted the gesture, interlocking his fingers with hers. 

She knew, by now, that his birth family had been harpooned like seals by a spiteful human after refusing to be chased out of their hunting territory. That his father had been kind and strong, that his mother had been the best singer in their pod and ferociously independent, that they had been mates for a long time and had loved each other in a way that had taught Dick to accept nothing less. That they had more than deserved the adoration and remembrance of their son.

“I wish I could say that my biological family was good like that,” she said softly. “My birth parents never cared much for me. I don’t think they knew how to. And when they died, my father  _ was _ good, he always loved me, but my mother treated me like a nuisance and an inconvenience at best. My brother was sadistic, heartless; he was caught for multiple counts of murder a few years ago. Maybe it was a blessing that they both left me.”

He chirped softly, squeezing her hand a little tighter. She took a deep breath, feeling a little tension in her chest ease. 

“And...my origins are mostly different too. My family are all from Europe,” she told him. “England, Scotland, Russia -- but mostly Ireland. They were poor, suffering terribly in their home country; there was a famine and their ruling neighbors refused to help them, were perfectly willing to let them die.” She ran her thumb over his knuckles. “But it’s true that, like  _ your _ people, they came here across the sea.”

He inclined his head. 

“You know, it makes sense, in a way,” she mused. “The Irish were an island people, surrounded by the ocean; they had all sorts of stories about the water and the creatures that lived in it.” She smiled wryly, feeling better still. “Of course, they talked about the merrows -- which is what they called the merpeople, like you. Apparently, the merrow women were stunningly beautiful, but their men were said to be hideously ugly, so, take that as you will.”

He made a playfully screwed-up face at her, then looked surprised when she didn’t continue. Inclining his head again, he, to her surprise, spun his hand in an unmistakable  _ go-on _ gesture.

“My hideous ugliness aside, I’m listening.”

“Oh. _Oh._ Alright. Well, there was also Danu, the great water goddess, the mother of the Tuatha Dé Danann. The kelpies and the dobhar-chú, which were said to have tricked and drowned and devoured unwary travelers. The selkies, the seal people, who could shed their skins and walk on land…”

He listened to everything she had to say, his hand still in hers, until long after the moon had risen above the sea. 

* * *

When June ended and the sea grass began to crisp and golden under the relentless heat of July, Dinah came to visit again. The two women sat on the porch again, Dinah in a scandalously tight blouse, fanning herself, both of them having desperately reached out for any kind of drink with ice. 

“I finally get the Southern appeal for sweet tea and mint juleps,” Dinah yawned. “Don’t tell Zinda I said this, but her people were on to something.”

Barbara had taken the crackly radio out with them, and Nat King Cole sang softly while she sipped her lemonade. Under the broad brim of her hat, Dinah glanced over at her, a strange expression on her face. 

“What is it, Di?”

“It’s Ollie,” Dinah said without preamble. Barbara choked on her lemonade. “He wrote me, told me he’ll be in Providence soon on a business trip. He asked if I want to meet up with him.”

“Ollie...you haven’t seen him in years, Di. You two haven’t been together since the war. And he expects you’ll drop everything to go to Providence to see him? Is he out of his godforsaken m --”

“I’m going to do it.”

Barbara turned all the way to the side in her chair just to gape.

“War’s just broken out again, this time in Korea, Babs. He could get drafted again, for all I know. I know he and I left things in a bad place, I know what he did, but…” Dinah was suddenly blinking rapidly. 

“Oh, God. Dinah. You still love him, don’t you.” It wasn’t a question.

“I never stopped. Look, honey, you know how hard it is to be loved,  _ really _ loved, when you’re not the kind of woman people want you to be.”

Barbara bowed her head, her hand bracing on her wheel.

“And it’s no different when you’re the kind of woman that people mistake for a queen or a fairy. The men that usually want to go with me are queers, they only like men. And parts aside, I’m  _ no _ man.”

“I know, Di.” Barbara set her lemonade down and took her best friend’s hand; Dinah gripped it warmly. 

“And you and I had some good times after Ollie left, Babs…” Dinah winked at her, and Barbara couldn’t help but smile at the old memories. “Especially since I knew from the get-go that you liked women too. But I do still love him. I always wanted him. And it was good to be seen as who I am by someone who could’ve easily seen right through me.”

“...I still don’t like him.”

Dinah laughed, even through wiping at her eyes. 

“I’m not asking you to. Just don’t try to stop me from going to Providence, because if he’s really as sorry as his letter makes him out to be, God Himself couldn’t stop me from getting to the city and into his hotel bed. And if he’s not, I want to be the first one to kick his ass.”

They both laughed this time; a slight breeze rustled from the sea and through their hair. 

“I don’t know how you’re brave enough to risk yourself so easily, Dinah. Not just with partners, but with us, with your friends, too. But you are. Every time.”

An odd, knowing spark entered Dinah’s eyes. 

“Love’s worth it, honey.”

They both finished their drinks as Doris Day began to sing, as the old wooden porch swing squeaked just slightly as Dinah rocked, back and forth, smiling to herself. 

“You’ve been great to me over the years, Di. Even when I didn’t deserve it. So...if you really think going to see Ollie will make you happy...well, I want you to be happy.”

Dinah leaned over and kissed Barbara’s cheek. A smear of red lipstick remained, almost in the shape of a heart. 

“Of course. That’s what all friends want for each other.”

The radio crackled again, and the hot sun glittered on the waves.

* * *

Dick’s smile had been lingering in her mind recently. It felt good to be around him, to make him happy just by  _ being _ there, and she was touched by him, in awe of him. He had been hurt by humans, and she could hardly call him innocent, yet he was still genuinely fascinated by and curious of them and their world. 

She saw him with his siblings, the way he consistently tried to take care of them and to keep their father doing the same, how he was nice to her friends and took their playful teasing and ribbing in stride whenever they happened to see him. 

He actually  _ listened _ to her, genuinely  _ liked _ how smart she was and how much she knew. He called her kind. 

He also had come to her that afternoon, covered in scratches, proudly bearing a huge dead swordfish that he had caught and wrestled, like he was Saint George with the head of the dragon. 

“Good thing we both like swordfish,” he’d said, offering it up to her. “Remember?”

She’d been too astonished to really process that he’d _fought and killed a swordfish_ for _her_ , spluttering that he was crazy -- but accepting the fish anyway. He’d beamed at once, and her heart had thundered in her chest, red in the face as she wrapped the fish and managed to get it into her fridge.

She watched him napping in her bathtub, recovering from the fish ordeal while she read a book, just a room away, his tail fins just brushing against the tiles below. She caught herself once again admiring the beauty of his tail, the precise shade of his scales, the fact that his skin seemed to glow to her, scars and all. 

Barbara shook her head and went back to Simone de Beauvoir. Minutes later, she glanced up again, just as he shifted in his sleep, turning so that the sunlight from the window illuminated his whole body. The way his lithe, narrow torso rose and fell as he breathed, his broad shoulders looking even broader in the small tub, the power evident in his defined arms. His soft hair floated in the water just next to his lovely face; not for the first time, she caught her breath. His expression was peaceful, and his long lashes fluttered like wings. 

A warm feeling began to grow in her lower belly; her heartbeat sped up again and she fidgeted uncomfortably in her seat. 

She had been feeling, recently, odd, sudden urges every once in a while, to touch him. His hands, his face, his body; she could not help but think of her fingers trailing down his chest, the flat planes of his belly, her touch lingering around his hips, where scales met skin. They mingled with her strong, undeniable feelings of awe and affection, sometimes even rose together as one. 

Her nightmares of the war had been eased by the arrival of different dreams, dreams that also left her waking up panting and sweating -- but for an entirely different reason, the sheets damp beneath her unfeeling thighs. 

Barbara’s face grew hot at the memory. She buried her face in the book, inhaling the scent of paper, trying to calm herself down. 

In the next room, water sloshed a bit, and she knew he’d woken up. Her face burned even more, and she desperately hoped he wouldn’t notice anything off. 

“Is it almost time to go?” he asked sleepily. “I don’t want to miss it.”

“Oh -- I -- yes, we should get ready.”

She tried not to look as he emerged from the tub, curled on the floor and drying himself off with one of her towels. He clambered into the spare wheelchair left near the door, shaking out his hair, huffing slightly. 

Barbara hastily handed him the spare shirt, and offered him a long blanket off her couch, which he obligingly tucked over and around his tail and fin. She draped one more one top for good measure. 

“People are going to think it’s strange that you’re wearing blankets in July,” she said, “but it’s better than them thinking it’s strange that you’re half-fish.”

“That is true.”

He gazed around the town with wide eyes as they rolled through it, staring openly at almost everything they passed. He lingered particularly long in the window of Snyder’s, eyeing the tables and the customers and the jukebox and the platters of food, and she agreed that it would probably be a good idea to stop for dinner; they had plenty of time before the movie started. 

The diner wasn’t too busy that evening, and a waitress swiftly brought her a cup of coffee and him a glass of water, before setting down his salmon and Barbara’s cheeseburger. He tried several bites of both her burger and her french fries, eyes going wide at the unfamiliar tastes. She giggled at his expression, charmed at him. 

“These are as salty as the sea,” he mumbled around a mouthful of fries. 

“You should try them with ice cream,” she said. Then: “Actually…” She waved the waitress back over. “Can we get a chocolate malted, please? To split?”

The waitress looked at the two of them for a moment, surprised, then smiled. When she came back with the drink, there was extra whipped cream, on top of the spoons and straws. For some reason, she winked rather obviously at Barbara before leaving their table again; she whispered something to her two coworkers and all three giggled.  _ Rachel _ ,  _ Amanda _ , and  _ Nicola, _ their name tags winked. 

Dick took one bite of the malt, and immediately started eating it with a spoon. Whipped cream smeared on his nose; she wiped it off with her thumb. Nicola, their waitress, stifled a smile. 

“Don’t have a lot of those under the sea?” she murmured. 

“Only if dry land has a lot of vampire squids.”

“...I’m sorry?”

“Vampire squids. They have black cloak-like webbing with fleshy spikes, like teeth, on the tentacles underneath, and red eyes, and they have organs on them that can produce flashing lights, and they live live in the deepest, darkest part of the ocean --”

“You’re making that up.”

“No, I swear! They’re real!”

“Uh-huh. Sure. I’m looking it up when we get home.”

The waitstaff smiled as she paid the check (earning strange looks from other patrons as she did), and as they left, Dick still insisting on the existence of various strange and highly improbable sea creatures. They took their place at the movie theater while he told her about frilled sharks and gulper eels and frogfish, the cartoons flickering across the screen, then the newsreels, a few other people contentedly eating popcorn or smoking cigarettes in their seats. 

“If you’re not lying, you inhabit a very strange world, Dick.”

“How do you think I feel about yours?”

They had to sit in the aisle, as there was no room for their wheelchairs anywhere else, but he leaned his head on her shoulder, content, as  _ The Asphalt Jungle  _ began to play. His clawed hand wrapped around hers, and they attracted stares from almost everyone else, but he only looked to the movie -- and, sometimes, to his side, to her. 

* * *

It was swelteringly hot the day before Dinah was to drive off to Providence, when she and Zinda and Helena came over with an ice box full of beer and Zinda’s grill in the backseat. Barbara made potato and pasta salad, and Helena brought a  _ Cassata alla Siciliana _ , and the four women set up the grill on the beach and started cooking the steaks and shrimp and sausages together, dipping like herons into the beer. 

They joked and talked together, Dinah sharing amusing stories from her time singing with the USO, then about her childhood in Gotham and her adulthood in Star City and Seattle, with Helena comparing that with experiences she’d had growing up in Gotham, then Sicily, then Gotham again. Zinda expressed gratitude that she had never lived in Gotham. 

It was some time after that that two more girls rose from the surface of the water, waving to the women on the beach. 

“Are they…?”

“Yes.”

“Huh. Mermaids don’t wear shirts? Or, I don’t know, shell-bras?”

“Evidently not.” Barbara waved to Stephanie and Cassandra; both girls tittered, then started making unmistakable, invitational gestures to her. 

“You want me to come into the water?”

“Obviously!” Stephanie called while Cassandra nodded. 

It was a quick trip from the walkway to the dock; sunlight sparkled on the surface as she slid in, her world temporarily encased in bubbles. The girls cheerfully laughed like dolphins, spiraling around her, playfully encouraging her to swim to them, reaching out to touch her hair. 

When she surfaced, the girls’ laughter mingled with that of her friends, with the smell of cooking meat, with the call of the seabirds. Cassandra caught her wrist, tagging her, fins flicking like raven wings, while Stephanie’s scales flashed like the feathers of a tropical bird. Barbara smiled and slapped the surface of the water, spraying them, starting a furious water-fight that the other three immediately ran into the sea to join. 

She plunged under the waves to duck their splashes, and opened her eyes, gazing up at the surface of the water. Against the glimmering veneer, the gold of the sun, five black silhouettes stood out, and right then, she could not tell which were mer and which were human.

* * *

News about the burgeoning war in Korea clattered on as Dinah’s car drove off towards the highway, as, over the next few days, she didn’t return from Providence. Barbara coldly stifled the discomfort in her gut that grew hearing about this new war, and tended to her library. The other librarians gave her uncomfortable looks, but now knew better than to pry too much. Helena kept coming in, usually bringing her students along too, which didn’t leave room for much conversation. Zinda came in occasionally as well, and managed to find a  _ Handbook of the Thompson Submachine Gun _ with little effort, but just cast Barbara a concerned look as she did. 

Barbara stayed in her home through the afternoon, wheeling around aimlessly, the news of the war growing, expanding inside her mind. She remembered the rattle of the gunfire, the searing blasts of the shells and bombs. She remembered the all-encompassing agony of the bullet ripping through her flesh and shattering her spine. 

Night had fallen by the time she, feeling suffocated in her own home, rolled out, not thinking, muscle memory just taking her to the dock she had been frequenting so often since the beginning of May. July had mostly elapsed now; over the last few months, time had flown on the quickest it had since before Pearl Harbor. 

She slipped out of her chair and down to the dock, laying down on her back upon the creaking wood, staring up at the full silver moon and the stars, the water inches from her fingertips. 

The lapping of the waves could not erase the sounds of war from her mind. But it did, to some degree, block them out. 

“Barbara?”

She rolled on her side and nearly came nose-to-nose with him. It was high tide, and the water had carried him directly to her level. Even partially shrouded in shadow, half-submerged in the placid ocean, she could not help but notice how beautiful he looked in the moonlight. 

“Are you alright?”

Her first instinct was still to lie. But all of a sudden, the last few months, which had flown by while they were happening, all caught up to her at once. 

“I’ve been better,” she admitted, internally wincing. It never did to admit weakness, it had never served her well, especially now that she was handicapped. But the words just fell out. “The war, last decade, I...I fought in it. It left a mark on me. Sometimes that mark hurts worse than others.”

Dick rose slightly further, resting his arms on the dock. His scars puckered and pulled as he moved; when he stopped again, their faces were only inches away. 

“Okay,” he said softly.

“No, you don’t understand,” she burst out. “That war fucked my head sideways, Dick. I enlisted to end the war quicker, to do the right thing and protect the innocent people I knew were being killed and suffering, but I had no idea of the scale of it. What everyone fighting in it had done, or would do. Or what the U.S. was  _ willing _ to do to end it. 

The people I fought -- the Nazis -- they murdered  _ millions _ of innocents. Millions. They enslaved and tortured their own neighbors. They did things I can’t articulate without wanting to vomit. I guess I got off easy, comparatively. I only got shot in the shoulder and the side and got a little shrapnel in my torso before a Nazi bullet ripped through my back and took my legs. He stood over me after he did it. He walked over to me and laughed at me, and smiled at me, and took pictures, and said  _ Der Führer _ would love to see what happened to a cripple like me. I thought I was going to die. He bent over me, and I reached for my holster, and I thought that smashing his teeth out of his smiling face with the butt of my pistol would be the last thing I would ever do. I was covered in both our blood when the medical unit dug the bullet out of my back. 

I don’t give a fuck about him anymore. He’s meaningless. But I cannot get the fucking war, the people who suffered, out of my head anymore, I --” Barbara let out a shuddering sob. “All the fighting I could have done in a lifetime, and I could never have saved all the people who suffered and died. So now I grant my people knowledge, wisdom, as best I can while America has not learned a single fucking thing from the Nazis because everyone now wants to forget the war and keep spitting on the downtrodden from the comfort of their new suburban home.”

She was breathing hard by the time she finished talking. All her rage and pain thrummed in her skin, pounded through her veins, and she trembled, fully exposed, like a raw, open nerve. 

This was why she had left every lover she’d had since the bullet. She could trust none of them with this, with all of her. Only her father and her friends knew. Only  _ they _ understood. Everyone else, she was convinced, would take one look at all the rage and pain she could not forget, and would be repelled on sight. 

“I’m here, Barbara.”

She started, and stared. 

For once, he didn’t talk. He didn’t need to say anything more.

“I’m here, Barbara.”

For the first time in five years, she let someone else see her cry. 

* * *

“Losing your legs wasn’t an injustice to you?”

“It was just a single moment of my life, Dick. I do miss my legs sometimes, but I’ve learned to live without them. I still have my friends, my father…and you. It was horrendous at the time, yes, but there are greater injustices than what happened to me.”

“...”

“Answer me honestly. Do you think my injury -- that I --”

“I have never, ever thought that you were repellent or ugly. Ever. Did you think  _ my _ scars were ugly? What happened to you was awful to me. But your legs are there. Your scar is there. They’re part of you. That’s all. I don’t know what humans think. I don’t know how they judge. But that’s what  _ I  _ say about it.”

“...”

“Barbara?”

“I’m very lucky to know you, Dick.”

* * *

She woke up the next morning as dawn was breaking; Dick still curled up asleep in the water below the dock. The workday dragged on, and she returned to her home as soon as she could. She hastily went through her chores and fed Odie his dinner and ate her own and fixed a few books on the shelves -- putting back a collection of French folk legends, which had fallen open to the tale of Melusina. The story went that Melusina had been cursed to grow a serpentine tail from the waist down one day a week, marrying a nobleman who eventually saw her tail, her curse...and so caused her to flee in heartbreak. 

(Some versions had her as a fish from the waist down instead, a mermaid.)

Barbara had never liked that story much. 

By evening, she rolled back to the dock and had an apology ready on her lips, for putting so much on his shoulders all at once. But when he saw her, almost where she had left him that morning, he lit up just like he always did. There was a little more pain and worry, more concern for her, in his expression, but he was still clearly happy to see her, just like he was every time. 

She got out of her chair and sat on the edge of the dock; he hoisted himself out of the water and sat next to her. For a while, they were quiet together, her toes and his tail trailing in the shallows. An ocean breeze cut through the lingering heat of the day, the air perfumed with sea salt, making both their long hair flutter out behind them. Peony pink seeped into the sky like a blush. 

It took her a moment to realize that he was looking between her legs and his tail. One of his fingers traced the scars on his torso, all in turn, before he extended his hand to her side. She gasped, but he pressed his fingertips gently to her bullet scar, featherlight, before his hand dropped. He touched his tail, then her legs, then, finally, brought his hand upwards, to cover hers. He made his soft chirping noise in his throat as their fingers interlocked.

Tears sprang to her eyes again. They both turned, looking at each other again.

“It frightens me,” she confessed.

“What does, Babs?”

“Being with you. You seeing me.”

“How could you ever think that I would hate what I saw,” he managed to say, all he managed to get out before he was kissing her. 

Shock went through her like a physical thing, then all at once every bit of tension left her body; she sighed and melted into the kiss. One of her hands remained holding his, braced against the dock, her other wrapped around his shoulders, clutching him to her. His other hand caressed her head, moving down to tangle in her hair; he keened, low in his throat, as he kept kissing her, as she returned it, her chest and body pressing against his. 

His lips tasted as salty as the sea, and his clawed hands were warm and rough. She could not tear herself from him. 

“Come to my home,” she murmured as the sun began to go down. 

This time, when he curled into her lap while she wheeled them both up, she did not shy away, but held him close. She breathed in the scent of the sea that always clung to him, felt the heat pool in her belly as he held onto her, his bare chest pressed against hers. 

She had left the radio on.  _ But Beautiful _ played softly as her hands caressed down his back, as they traced on his waist where skin met scales, before reaching down to slide off her sandals. She then broke the kiss, pulling away as best she could while he was still on her lap. Then, meeting his eyes, she took his wrists and placed his hands on her breasts, then guided his lips to the side of her neck. He responded at once; his touch was so oddly delicate, gentle even, as though she were something precious. She managed to unbutton her blouse and slide it off; he cupped her, fondling her through her brassiere and made her gasp. 

“Why do you humans,” he gasped between kisses, “wear so many layers?”

She could not help but laugh softly, pressing a kiss of her own to the top of his head, before wheeling them through the darkened living room to her bedroom, both of them climbing onto her bed. But it was almost embarrassedly that she removed the last of her clothes; he openly gazed at her as she did, his eyes taking in every inch of her. His fingers reached out to the twisting map of her scar, touching it again, with no less gentleness than before. 

“Do you...do you still want to…”

“ _ Yes. _ ”

She stroked her hand down his flat stomach, teasing around his navel before sliding it down the front of his tail, gasping softly, making him growl low in his throat. Then she wrapped her arms around his shoulders, both of them panting, eyes locked. 

“You’re safe  _ too _ , aren’t you? Safe to trust. Safe to be around,” she murmured. 

He kissed her, then embraced her again as he settled between her legs; when he pushed inside her, she cried out, and he momentarily froze. 

“ _ Oh. _ Oh, I’m okay, darling,” she exclaimed softly. “I’m totally, completely okay.”

She pulled him even closer to her, finally moving together. As they did, their limbs cast in silver moonlight from the open window, the sight of his tail curling through her bedsheets seemed, in that moment, both strange and completely expected.

* * *

The broadest morning rays of sun were slotting through her window by the time Barbara woke up. Dick was still asleep, making soft huffing noises as he breathed, holding onto her pillow with his tail curled up around to his nose, catlike. She gently brushed his hair out of his eyes, back over his shoulder, exposing his fluttering gills and the soft look on his face. 

Some time passed while she just lay there, watching him. Allowing herself to openly admire him, caressing her hand down his shoulder, his back, over the beautiful scales. Letting herself take joy in his peace and contentment. 

Then she pressed one more kiss to his cheek, and even in his sleep, he sighed happily.

She slid out of bed, then wheeled to her bathroom and showered, drying her hair and slipping into her favorite sundress -- which was when she heard the voices coming from the rest of the house.

“-- it was really great of you to come! All the way from Gotham, she really  _ is _ going to be surprised...and of course it’s really great to see you again, Mr. and Mrs. Gordon.”

“Dinah, how many times do we have to tell you to call us Jim and Sarah?”

“Probably a lot more. Hey, where  _ is _ your daughter? It’s Saturday, she can’t be at work.”

“Maybe she went to the bookstore, or the market --”

“Oh, she’s probably just asleep. Let’s go give her her surprise.”

Too late, Barbara dropped her brush and threw open her bathroom door, racing into her bedroom just as her best friend, father, and stepmother walked in to see Dick sound asleep in her bed and his tail  _ not  _ hidden under the covers. 

The subsequent screaming and shouting woke him up so abruptly he jolted clear off the bed and onto the floor with a _ thud. _

But once they had calmed down enough to not be shrieking or hyperventilating anymore, Jim and Sarah were surprisingly receptive, breathing heavily, listening in astonishment as he explained who he was, that he had been getting to know Barbara over the last three months. Dinah, on the other hand, seized her friend’s wrist and dragged her out of the room. 

“Did you --” she spluttered, “Barbara -- did you -- did the two of you --”

“You look good,” Barbara said matter-of-factly. It was true, there was new warmth in Dinah’s eyes, lightness in her step. Her hair was freshly dyed, her lipstick red as ripe cherries. “Especially for having barged into my house and my bedroom. Ollie...he clearly made you happy, at least. That’s good,” she finished genuinely. “I’m glad for you.”

“Thank you. But don’t try to change the subject!” she yelled, pointing directly at her best friend’s face. “Did you...Oh my  _ God. _ ” She sounded downright gleeful. “You  _ did _ , didn’t you.”

Barbara ducked her head, blushing. Which was as good as a yes.

“How -- how did you -- seriously,  _ how. _ He’s got a tail! Which is very smooth at the front, so --”

Barbara shushed her, then pulled her in close, furtively checking to make sure her parents weren’t listening. 

“Okay. I’m only telling you this because I know you’re not going to let up about it. Um...yes, it looks smooth. But, apparently, with merfolk...um...there’s a slit, in the front of their tails. Most of the time, the muscles in the tail automatically keep it pulled closed. Are you with me so far?”

“Uh-huh.”

“But sometimes...during uh, very specific times...the muscles relax, and the slit pulls open. And that’s all there is to it, for a mermaid, but for a mer _ man _ , that also means…” With her hands, opening them and gesturing with her index finger, she copied what had happened. 

Dinah’s eyes went very wide. 

“You know,” she mused. “I’ve always wondered about that, about merpeople.”

“You’ve  _ always _ wondered?”

“So now I’m glad to know. But anyway, the next thing I’m going to say about this…” Dinah took a deep breath, fisting her hands in her hair. “I know this is  _ completely _ insane, but he really, clearly cares about you.” Her voice had become softer, inflected with something like hope. “Barbara, I know you, and I know this wasn’t just sex for you. I also know you used to think that this, that someone else seeing you and having feelings for you, was never going to happen for you again, but...well. Don’t let this one you caught get away, okay? Uh, so to speak.”

Barbara swallowed hard, fidgeting with the seam of her dress. She managed a deep breath, managed to look her friend in the eye. 

“I absolutely...do not want that to happen, Dinah.”

Something further softened in Dinah’s eyes; she bent and pressed a kiss to Barbara’s forehead, marking it one more time. Both women smiled.

“So. Fair’s fair, and I know you want to: tell me everything that happened in Providence.”

Dinah lit up. 

* * *

She told him as such while he slid back into the sea, sitting on the dock with her feet in the water, her heart in her throat. 

He was only quiet for a moment afterwards. 

“If you don’t want me to get away, Barbara, then I won’t leave.”

* * *

A few days later, her parents and her friends all followed the two of them down to the water’s edge. The sky and the sea were both brilliant blue, merging together, indistinguishable at the shining horizon, and the air shimmered with heat. The Soviet Union and the war in Korea still loomed; people eyed each other apprehensively from the street. Seagulls called and the round heads of seals poked from the distant waves. August had since dawned, but there was still plenty of golden summer left.

From where he was sitting, next to her in her spare wheelchair, Dick took her hand, squeezing gently. 

Then, he cupped his hand around his mouth and sang. Just as it’d had months before, the song captivated her at once, but this time, she  _ let _ herself be carried away, closing her eyes and breathing in the strange, overpowering music. Soft gasps and sighs of satisfaction echoed behind her as the rest of her loved ones took it in too. 

It was only a few minutes before the other merfolk slid their heads and shoulders above the water, and only then did Dick stop singing. Barbara breathed out softly, not ashamed or embarrassed of her lapse. 

“Good fucking God,” Jim exclaimed, as the families came face-to-face. Sarah stared in awe; Dinah, Helena, and Zinda exchanged grins. 

Bruce slid to the front of the group, looking carefully up at his son, at the accompanying group of humans. Then he lifted one hand and raised it up to the dock, to the two elder Gordons. 

“It is good to meet her pod at last,” he said with weighty graveness. It was so unnecessarily formal that the six youngsters all tittered. 

“Ah, there’s no need for that,” Jim said, but he bent anyway, shaking Bruce’s hand. The big merman nodded to him, and the youngsters all immediately broke out into excited chatter. Dinah, Helena, and Zinda all immediately sat down on the edge of the dock, Jim and Sarah joining them after only a moment’s hesitation. The pod swam closer, until they had all merged into a single group, all talking together as one. 

“Well, mission accomplished,” Barbara murmured. 

Dick leaned slightly into her side, kissing her cheek. Then he rolled right to the edge of the dock, springing from the chair, arcing up and diving straight into the sea. 

Barbara laughed, suddenly filled with joy, as she rolled her chair up too. Her slide down was slower, more painstaking, but the end result was the same, plunging into the water, surrounded by silver bubbles and golden sunlight. 

She let him take her hand, and all of a sudden, he was swimming, tail cutting through the current and taking her fast, faster than she had ever swum before. She cut through the water like she was part of it, closing her eyes until they finally broke the surface. 

Out in the middle of the cove, she could not tell where sky met sea. She stared out at the vast expanse of the ocean, caught in awe. 

She did not feel entirely worthy of such a gift, felt frightened of its expanse. But it was too beautiful for her to attempt back to shore. 

She plunged back under the water, opening her eyes through the salt and brine and to Dick’s gaze, taking in, once again, the merman she had saved. Her pain was impossible to forget, but surrounded by the water, by him, his expression glowing, it eased, and the ferocity of the world was a little less hard to bear. 

Then he kissed her again, under the shining water, under the dusty-gold rays of the summer sun, and she thought that maybe Homer had been wrong, having Odysseus remain lashed tight to his mast. 

That maybe it was a good thing to get swept out to sea once in a while. 


End file.
